The Return of Peter Grimm Part 1

The Return of Peter Grimm.

by David Belasco.

CHAPTER I

A MAN AND A MAID

The train drew to a halt at the Junction. There was a fine jolt that ran the length of the cars, followed by a clank of couplings and a half-intelligible call from the conductor.

The pa.s.sengers,--dusty, jaded, crossly annoyed at the need of changing cars,--gathered up their luggage and filed out onto the bare, roofless station platform. There, after a look down the long converging rails in vain hope of sighting the train they were to take, they fell to glancing about the cheerless station environs.

Far away were rolling hills, upland fields of wind-swept wheat, cool, dark stretches of woodland. But around the station were areas of ill-kept lots, with here and there a jerry-built cottage, sadly in need of shoring, and bereft of paint. Across the road on one side stood the general store with its clump of porch-step loafers and its windows full of gaudy advertis.e.m.e.nts. To the side, and parallel with the tracks, sprawled a huge, weather-buffeted signboard that read:

"_Grimm's Botanical Gardens and Nurseries._ _1 Mile._"

The pa.s.sengers eyed the half-defaced lettering, pessimistically. But almost at once they received a far pleasanter reminder of the botanical gardens. A boy, flushed with running, and evidently distressed at being late, pattered up the road and onto the platform. From one of his fragile arms hung a great basket. The lid had fallen aside and showed the basket piled to the brim with fresh flowers.

Hurrying to the nearest pa.s.senger--an obese travelling man who mopped a very red face,--the boy timidly held a Gloire de Dijon rose up to him and recited with parrot-like glibness:

"With the compliments of Peter Grimm."

The fat man half unconsciously took the rose from the little hand and stood looking as though in dire doubt what to do with it. The boy did not help him out. Already he had moved on to the next pa.s.senger,--this time a man of clerical bearing and suspiciously vivid nose,--and handed him a gleaming Madonna lily.

"With the compliments of Peter Grimm," he announced, pa.s.sing on to the next.

And so on down the bunched line of waiting men and women the lad made his way. In front of each, he paused, presented a flower taken at random from the basket, recited his droning formula, and pa.s.sed on.

The fat travelling man stared stupidly at his rose. Then he looked about him, half shamefacedly and in wonder.

"What in blazes----?" he began.

"You must be a stranger in this part of the state," volunteered a big young fellow, who had just come out of the waiting-room. "Did you never hear of the flower-giving at the Junction?"

"No. What's the idea? Is it done on a bet? Or is it an 'ad' for the man on the sign over there?"

"Neither. It has been Peter Grimm's custom for twenty years or more.

Ever since I first knew him."

"And it isn't an ad?"

"No," was the enigmatic answer as the big young man moved off in the wake of the lad. "It's Peter Grimm."

The boy meanwhile had reached the last of the pa.s.sengers. She was middle-aged and motherly-looking. She peered down at him with more than common interest as he went through his pat little presentation formula.

A psychologist would have gathered much from the lad's tense, flushed face and in the oddly strained look of the big blue eyes. To this woman, he was only a thin, lonely looking youngster, whose face held an unconscious appeal that she answered without reading it.

"I am very much obliged to Mr. Peter Grimm for sending me this lovely flower," she said, a little patronisingly, as she sniffed at the half-opened Killarney rose she held.

"You need not be," answered the boy. "He didn't really send it to you.

In fact, I'm quite sure he never even heard of you. He just sent it because he is good and because----"

"Because he loves flowers," suggested the woman as the boy hesitated.

"No," corrected the boy, in his gentle, old-fashioned diction, wherein lurked the faintest trace of foreign accent, "I never heard him say anything about loving flowers. But I know the flowers love him."

"What?"

"You see, they grow for him as they don't grow for any one else. _Much_ better I am sure," he added a little bitterly, "than they will ever grow for Frederik. I don't think flowers love Frederik."

"What queer ideas you have!" she laughed, embarra.s.sed at his quiet statement of facts that seemed to her absurd. "Are you Mr. Grimm's son?"

"No, ma'am. He is not married. I don't think he has any sons at all. I'm Anne Marie's son."

"Anne Marie? Anne Marie--what?"

"Just Anne Marie. I'm Willem, you know."

"William?"

"No, ma'am. Willem."

"Willem Grimm?"

"No, ma'am. Anne Marie's Willem. I--Oh, Mr. Hartmann!" he broke off, catching sight of the big young man who drew near, "Mynheer Peter said you'd be on this train. Now I can have some one to walk back with."

Slipping his hand into Hartmann's, Willem turned his back on the platformful of perspiring beneficiaries and, together, the two struck off down the yellow, dusty road toward the double row of giant elms that marked the beginning of the village street.

Willem shuffled in high contentment alongside his big companion. And as he walked, he stole upward and sidelong glances of furtive hero worship at the tall, plainly clad figure. Jim Hartmann was of a build and aspect to rouse such worship in the frail little fellow. He had the shoulders, the chest girth, the stride of an athlete, tempered by the slight roundness of those same shoulders, the non-expansiveness of chest, and the heavy tread of the large man whose strength and physique have been acquired at manual labour instead of in athletics. A figure more common east of the Atlantic than in America.

His dark suit was neat and fitted honestly well. But it was palpably not the suit of a man whose father had worn custom-made clothes or whose own earlier youth had been blessed with such garments. Yet there was a breezy, staunch outdoorness about the whole man that reminded one of a breath of mountain air in a close room and left half unnoticed the details of costume and bearing.

"Weren't you glad to get away from New York City?" queried the boy as they came into the elm shade of Grimm Manor's one real street. "A week is an awful long time to be away from here."

"You bet it is. You're a lucky chap to be able to stay at Grimm Manor all the time instead of being sent here, there, and everywhere on business."

"I shouldn't like that," a.s.sented the boy; "I think people would be very liable of losing their way. I wonder if Mynheer Peter will send me 'here, there, and everywhere on business' when I'm older."

"Perhaps," agreed Hartmann, catching the slight note of wistfulness in Willem's voice. "You're beginning the way I began. It wasn't more than a week after my father got his gardening job with Mr. Grimm that I used to be sent up to meet the trains with a basket of flowers and 'the compliments of Peter Grimm.' It seems more like yesterday than eighteen years ago."

"I'm glad you're back from New York City," said the boy, circling back to the conversation's starting-point. "It's been rather lonely. Mynheer Peter has been so busy. And Frederik----"

"Well," queried Jim as the boy checked himself and looked nervously behind him, "what about Frederik? And why do you always look like that when you speak of him?"

"Like what?"

"As if you were afraid some one would slap you. Is Frederik ever unkind to you?"

"No," denied the boy, in scared haste. "No, he never is. He--he doesn't notice me at all. That's what I was going to say. He doesn't seem to care to. But he likes to be with Kathrien, I think. Yes, I'm sure he does. I think Kathrien missed you, too, Mr. Hartmann."